


cause you've got blood on your hands and i know it's mine (i just need more time)

by moonsrain



Category: Sagas of Sundry: Dread
Genre: Explicit Sexual Content, Horror, Multi, Occult, References to Drugs, Resurrection, Rituals, assisted self harm?, borderline suicidal ideation, does it still count as self harm if you get someone else to do it for you?, ethically dubious use of magic, raising the dead for fun and profit, warnings for pretty much everything to do with kayden, whatever you call it it's not what you'd call healthy coping
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-09
Updated: 2017-11-10
Packaged: 2018-12-25 17:05:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12040368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonsrain/pseuds/moonsrain
Summary: The mountain's been cleansed, but there was damage done by the curse that cannot be so easily undone, even though the malevolent presence is banished back to whatever cancerous source birthed it. The necromantic magic that raised up the hordes of undead has left the veil between this life and the next tattered and thin, and certain magic may be possible there that would require much greater power to perform anywhere else.At least, that's what Darby tells Kayden over a shared bottle of Southern Comfort passed back and forth between them in the alley behind the video store after Kayden's shift, almost half a year exactly since their second disastrous trip to the mountain.(The plan is this.1.Go up the mountain2. Find whatever is left of Tanner3. Nail Kayden to a treeYes, you read that right, and no, not in the sexy way. God, he wishes.)





	1. what’s the point of performing dangerous occult rituals in the middle of the forest if you’re not going to look cool while doing it?

The mountain's been cleansed, but there was damage done by the curse that cannot be so easily undone, even though the malevolent presence is banished back to whatever cancerous source birthed it. The necromantic magic that raised up the hordes of undead has left the veil between this life and the next tattered and thin, and certain magic may be possible there that would require much greater power to perform anywhere else.  
At least, that's what Darby tells Kayden over a shared bottle of Southern Comfort passed back and forth between them in the alley behind the video store after Kayden's shift, almost half a year exactly since their second disastrous trip to the mountain.

“And you didn’t think to mention that before now?” Kayden grumbles with halfhearted ire. He’s not really mad at Darby, she’s just being, y’know, _Darby_ , but these days any hint at hope digs like glass shards into the insides of his ribs. Darby doesn’t need to tell him why she’s been looking into resurrection. There’s only one possible reason, the same thing that drives Kayden to work until his boss won’t give him any more hours and then drink until he can’t dream, the same thing that’s got Sat angry at the whole world and Raina so sad that some days she doesn’t get out of bed.  
“I didn’t want to get anyone’s hopes up, but I’m sure of it now. I’ve got a plan, but Sat and Raina aren’t gonna like it, so I’m telling you first.” Darby has gotten, if possible, even more intense in the last few months. She barely even stutters these days when she tells them all about monsters and mysteries and magic that she’s researching, things that sound insane- but after the mountain, who’s to say it isn’t all true? Her black-rimmed eyes nearly glow in the light from the neon sign of the bar across the street, and her short shorn hair stands on end like she’s been running electric current through herself. Hell, she might actually have been doing that, Kayden doesn’t fucking know.

“What  _ do _ Sat and Raina like, these days?” Kayden takes the bottle back from Darby and takes a pull, relishing the burning sensation down his throat. “What’s your plan?”

Darby tells him.

Darby’s right, Sat and Raina are gonna  _ hate _ this plan. Kayden doesn’t give a single fuck. Kayden can still see the expression on Tanner’s face in the last seconds, when they locked eyes just before the horde pulled him under. Kayden hasn’t stopped seeing that every time he closes his eyes since they came off the mountain.

“I’m in,” he says.

\-----

“No,” says Sat, “Absolutely not.” She steps right up into Kayden’s space, eyes flashing, breath smelling like weed and the mint gum she chews to try to cover it up, although she’s anything but mellow now.

“Darby- Kayden- you guys can’t be serious,” Raina says softly from where she’s curled in on herself on Kayden’s ratty saved-from-the-curb couch, her pitch rising in distress. “We said we weren’t gonna go back up there.”

Darby reaches to Raina, putting a comforting hand on her shoulder that Raina leans into despite her dismay. “Raina, babe, I know we did, but isn’t it worth it? To get Tanner back?”

“You know I want him back as much as you do, guys, but what if... What if another one of us dies trying to do this? Tanner wouldn’t want that.”

“All the more reason to do it, then, if it’ll piss him off,” Kayden drawls, still too close and aggressive with Sat. Things haven’t been right between him and her since the mountain, even ignoring the awful year they spent not talking to each other. Without Tanner there to bicker with, Kayden and Sat have been short tempered with each other, but too desperate not to repeat the mistakes of the last year to really give each other enough space. They argue and fight and usually end up fucking, forgive each other afterwards and cling to each other in truly codependent fashion until one of them provokes the other over some stupid thing and the cycle starts over again. The tension this time is different, though. The ghost of Tanner’s presence seems to hover between them like a heat mirage, composed of all the things they don’t say even to each other: how even as much as they love each other, they both loved him equally as much; how they’re each so scared something will happen to the other and leave them the lone survivor; how Kayden flushed the last of Sat’s pills she was hoarding the same night they got back from the mountain, and how Sat made Kayden give his knives to Darby for safekeeping.

“Oh my god, Kayden,” Sat snaps. “Could you ditch the irony and attitude and be genuine for ten fucking minutes while we’re talking about risking all our lives on that  _ fucking _ mountain again?!”

“You want  _ genuine? _ ” Kayden is suddenly coldly furious. Sat of all people should be able to read between his bullshit so he doesn’t have to spell it out, but apparently even that much is out of sync these days. “I’ll give you fucking genuine: we don’t  _ work _ without him! We’re falling apart at the seams and you all know it, and going back up on that mountain might be risking our lives,  _ again _ , but if I don’t at least try to get him back it will actually kill me because I won’t be able to live with myself.” He realizes he’s breathing hard, and Sat’s staring up at him with a wounded expression. Kayden meets her eyes and holds them. Sat’s talked him out of a lot of dumb shit over the years, but not even she is going to dissuade him this time.

“Fine,” Sat says at last, “ _ Fine. _ If I can’t stop you then at least I can try to stop you from being too stupid.” Kayden sighs in relief and drops his forehead to hers, cupping the back of her head with one hand. After a moment she responds in kind, completing the intimate little gesture they’ve built over the years that means more than any kisses passed between them.

From the couch, Raina sighs deeply, “You know I can’t let you guys do this without me. At least you waited until I came back for winter break, I guess.” Kayden doesn’t have to move far in the tiny room to reach out to Raina, who grabs his hand and clings tightly.  
“Okay,” Darby says, “There’s some stuff I’m gonna need.”

\-----

Darby’s shopping list: Hammer. Nails (big long ones, at least 6 inches). Rope. Matches. A bowl, ‘borrowed’ from her mother’s never-used china. A cow’s heart, purchased from an extremely skeptical butcher and sealed in a tupperware container. As many candles as they can scrounge from their respective homes, and then even more from the local grocery. A ceremonial silver-plated dagger, ordered by mail from what Sat’s magazine claims is ‘the premiere supplier of occult materials in North America.’ Bunches of dried herbs tied with red thread- rosemary, rue, sage. Several long bones Darby carves with strange symbols and rubs with beeswax until they gleam, and which give Kayden a headache when he looks at them too long.

\-----

The day they plan to leave, Sat isn’t in the shitty apartment when Kayden wakes up. Kayden stares at the divot in the mattress where she usually sleeps for longer than he’d ever admit, then forces himself to get dressed and eat a breakfast of dry toast and a withered apple washed down with water. He repaints his nails, repacks his rucksack, and tries not to think about where Sat has gone.  
His anxiety turns out to be unfounded. Sat turns up with Raina in tow shortly before Darby arrives to pick them up in her barely-running coupe, both wearing matching expressions of smug defiance and holding bundles wrapped up in spare towels.  
“If we’re gonna do this, we’re gonna be prepared for everything,” Raina says as she sets her load on Kayden’s scarred kitchen counter, “So Sat and I picked the lock on the back door of the fire house and raided one of the ambulances.” She unwraps the towel to reveal a small trove of medical supplies: adrenaline in plastic-wrapped syringes, painkillers (the good shit, Kayden notes), bandages, disinfectant, suture kits. Sat arches an eyebrow at Kayden in her best dare-you-to-say-shit expression, but Kayden just grins at her and slings one arm around each of his friends.

To Raina he says, “This is the most punk thing you’ve ever done. I’m impressed!”

Raina looks away, but Kayden’s known her long enough to know she’s actually pleased. “It wasn’t punk, it was smart,” she says in her primmest tone of voice. Kayden just ruffles her ponytail affectionately.

They finish packing the medical supplies into their bags as Darby pulls up, her car sputtering distinctively, and they pile into their accustomed spots, Raina shotgun to Darby, well prepared with a map and their route marked on it in highlighter, Sat and Kayden on the back bench seat, smoking out of the windows, and the conspicuous empty space between them where Tanner always used to sit so he could prop his long legs up on the center console.

\---

The plan is this. 

  1. Go up the mountain 
  2. Find whatever is left of Tanner 
  3. Nail Kayden to a tree



 

Yes, you read that right, and no, not in the sexy way. God, he wishes.

\-----

Darby parks her car where they’ve left it before, just outside the stretch of fence still hanging open from where Tanner cut the wires, the barbed wire at the top still decorated with scraps of fabric from their sleeping bags the year before that. Kayden holds the wire back for the girls and lets them slip through, then follows behind them, letting the sharp ends of the wires scrape harmlessly off his military jacket. They trek together through the woods without talking much, each lost in their own thoughts, past the collapsed research cabin, up towards Agatha and Simon’s house.

Their original escape route was long since closed behind them by the rockfall, so the only way to return to the place where Tanner died is to go through the secret passage from Agatha’s house. The house seems more sad than frightening in daylight. The front door hangs open, the hallway beyond filled with leaves and the wallpaper stained with rainwater. Darby and Raina pull out their flashlights to illuminate the house’s dim interior, while Kayden slips on his brass knuckles, just in case.

Agatha’s room at the end of the hallway stands ajar, the puzzle door still unlocked, possibly from when they solved it themselves. The secret passage is still accessible, and they venture down single file, Darby in the lead. There’s still a rockfall in the passageway at the bottom of the stairs from when Sat triggered it to block Simon, but the four of them working together manage to quickly clear enough room to slip through.

There’s no sign of the pile of bones in the large circular chamber. Kayden feels his pulse ratchet up, and Raina grabs at his hand. He returns her grip and reaches for Sat with his other hand, feeling clammy sweat on her skin. Darby grabs Raina’s other hand, and that’s how they walk through the caverns, four abreast in silence. Eventually they start to find small bones, then larger ones, and eventually whole skeletons- humans, horses, dogs- all so ancient that any flesh has rotted clean away or dessicated into dry leather. The concentration of corpses gets thicker and thicker until they reach a point where there’s no way forward without stepping on the bodies.

Raina lets out a muffled wail and drops Kayden’s hand to point. Over to the left, one of the skeletal warriors has a familiar looking arrow sticking out of its chest. Immediately ahead the bodies are thickest, a waist high tangle of bones. Kayden feels his mouth twist as he remembers the horde moving and writhing as it chased them. Now they lie still and silent, like bad horror movie props.

“Start digging,” he says. They start to shift bones without talking, although Raina and Sat both make periodic noises of disgust. Darby is the least fazed by all of it, but then Kayden supposes she’s been dealing with dead animals and such in all of her rituals and research.

Tanner, when they uncover him, is barely recognizable, although clearly the freshest corpse in the pile. It could have been worse, Kayden thinks, as blood roars in his ears. The caverns are dry caves instead of wet, and sealed off from most wildlife. The rot could have been a lot worse. Behind him, Sat turns and vomits. Kayden feels powerless to move, staring at the familiar mop of hair, now mussed and matted, the plaid jacket he’d seen Tanner wear every day of high school, the chunk of flesh just  _ missing _ from his neck. The old and crusted bloodstains. One hand still in a death grip around a shattered half of the ancient bow. Tanner’s fingernails are broken and torn and Kayden can’t catch his breath.

To his surprise, Raina is the one who composes herself first.

“C’mon guys. Let’s get him out of here.”

Sat spits and sniffles. “Yeah. Yeah. Hang on.” She sets down her rucksack and rummages through it until she finds the old bedsheets they brought for this purpose. Sat and Raina spread the sheet on the nearest piece of flat ground while Darby and Kayden lift Tanner as gingerly as they can and lay him out in the center of the sheet. They have to go back for one arm. They’re about to start wrapping the sheets around Tanner to carry him out when Darby makes a pained sound.

“His glasses! Where are his glasses? We have to find them!” Darby’s black rimmed eyes are wide, whites showing all round as she whirls and scans the pile. Raina, Kayden, and Sat immediately join her in searching the area. Kayden feels panic tight in his chest. The thought of Tanner without his glasses seems deeply wrong somehow, enough to drive him to toss through bones and rotten leathers with abandon, the silence of the cavern now broken with the sounds of bones clattering and breaking. Kayden eventually spots them near the far edge of the pile, beside the other half of the broken bow. The glasses are amazingly undamaged save for a crack all the way across the left lens. He hands them off to Darby, who reverently settles them back into place on what remains of Tanner’s face, then wraps the sheet around him like a shroud.

With Sat holding one end of the sheet and Kayden the other, Darby and Raina illuminating the path before them, they carry Tanner back out into the light.

\-----

Darby's theory is this: The boundary between this life and the next is so thin, that if they can send Kayden just to the edge of dying, he'll be able to find Tanner's spirit and bring it back. Darby has spells that will fix Tanner's body as good as new (and this much, at least, she was able to prove to Kayden, working over the sad limp form of a neighborhood cat that had been hit by a car until it shivered, yowled, and sprang off the table with no hint of a broken spine or crushed organs) and from that point it's up to Kayden to bring back Tanner's spirit so Darby can tie it to his body once more.

(If his spirit is still there, they don’t say. If it hasn’t moved on already. If he hasn’t left them.)

\-----

They make camp at the top of the mountain. Not by the remains of the medicine wheel, now scattered and strewn with leaves, but under the branches of the largest tree they can find, a wide trunked rough barked behemoth none of them can identify. It’s still daylight for a few more hours, the sun warming the stones on the ground despite the chill in the December air. Kayden and Darby go ahead and build a crackling fire while the other two girls stockpile firewood from the dry deadfall on the surrounding slopes until they have a tower almost to Kayden’s shoulder. Between the four of them their two nylon tents go up quickly, staked down against the wind with all the pent up aggression Kayden can bring to bear with the rubber mallet. Tanner’s shrouded form takes place of honor laid out across a rock outcropping nearby, with the fire placed equidistant between him and the tree.

They arrived early in the morning, and there’s still a couple of hours left until sundown, when Darby needs to start the first ritual, to repair Tanner’s body. By unspoken agreement they pair off separately, Darby and Raina staying by the fire while Kayden and Sat wander into the fringe of the forest, not too far but enough to allow some modicum of privacy. Sat wastes no time in stripping Kayden out of his jacket and pressing him up roughly against a tree, kissing him hard and sloppy. He wraps his now bared arms around her and holds her tightly, pale skin and paler scars against her dark hair.

They end up fucking dirty and debauched on the forest floor, going at each other with an edge of desperation, like every time they’ve had sex since the awful missing year, since Tanner dying. Sat grabs his mohawk and rides his face through two orgasms before paying any attention to his erection, as unapologetic as ever about taking her pleasure, not that Kayden has ever had a problem giving Sat anything she wanted to take out of his sorry hide. When she finally lets him up he only takes a moment to catch his breath before fumbling a condom out of a pocket of his discarded jacket. As soon as he has it on Sat pushes him back down into the leaves and dirt and straddles him, sliding down on his cock with ease. She feels amazing as always, but also comfortingly familiar, and being inside her is as close to feeling at home as Kayden has felt in a long time, and a welcome distraction from his building anxiety. Kayden presses a thumb against her clit as she rides him, pushing up on his elbows to kiss her again with fervor, and when he tumbles over the edge Sat follows behind him with a third orgasm, biting his shoulder as she does.

They lie in the leaves for a while afterwards, not bothering to put clothing back on, Sat curled half onto Kayden’s chest, tracing abstract patterns with a fingernail.

“You’re not gonna leave me behind, right?” she finally asks. Kayden turns his head to the side to press a kiss to the top of her hair and makes a noncommittal noise.

“I’m serious, Kayden,” she says, but without ire. “If I lose you on top of Tanner I don’t know what’s gonna happen. One of us gone is bad enough, but two? I don’t think I can do it.”

Kayden sighs. “I don’t wanna make promises I don’t know for sure I can keep, Sat. You’ll be okay no matter what, though, you’ve got Darby and Raina to look out for you.” Sat whines in protest. “No, shut up for a second. I won’t leave you if there’s any other option, but me for Tanner is more than a fair trade. He’s the one who had plans, who had a whole future planned out. He’s the one who’ll marry you and make sure you have a better home than some shit heap apartment. If it turns out the only way to send him back is to stay behind myself, I’m gonna do it, and I’m sorry it’ll hurt you, but I’m gonna because I love him too.”

Sat props herself up over him, their noses almost touching as she searches his face intently. “I know I’m not gonna be able to stop you from doing something once you’ve made up your mind, but I don’t want one of you at the cost of the other, okay? Just remember that.”

Kayden tilts his head up and presses his forehead to hers. It’s answer enough.

\-----

Sat and Kayden return to their little camp to find Darby and Raina in a similar state of disarray, and exchange sheepish glances before starting to prepare for the ritual. The first order of business is repairing everyone’s clothes and makeup- after all, what’s the point of performing dangerous occult rituals in the middle of the forest if you’re not going to look cool while doing it? Sat brushes out her hair and Raina’s and passes around her tube of lipstick. Kayden redoes his eyeliner and then Sat and Darby’s because he has the steadiest hand for it. Raina braids her hair up in a crown around her head and allows Darby to twine ivy into it, then Sat insists that Raina help her achieve a similar style. Kayden steps back for a moment to watch his three girls- his sisters, his lover- and thinks that they look like priestesses from some forgotten religion, Darby in her butch suit coat and Sat in her best ass-kicking leather and Raina with her silver moon pendant and tights. They’re beautiful in the golden afternoon light, and Kayden is glad to see them like this, united in this moment as though nothing had ever split them apart.

The sun creeps lower, its bottom edge brushing the horizon. Sat stokes the flames of their fire higher and hotter as Darby lays out the components of the ritual and lights candles everywhere, and Kayden and Raina prepare Tanner’s body. He’s not any easier to look at as they unwrap the shroud, but they do their best, fitting his arm back into its socket as best they can, arranging his limbs until it almost seems like he might have died sleeping. Raina produces Tanner’s camera from her backpack and lays it at his head. Following Darby’s instructions, they place different crystals on his body at forehead, throat, heart, stomach, pelvis, legs, and feet. Darby approaches with a bowl and has each of them cut their arm and bleed into it, then uses the mixed blood to paint symbols on Tanner’s body that seem to change subtly when Kayden isn’t looking directly at them.

Darby gathers them all around the fire, one person at each of the cardinal points: Kayden is west, Sat east, Raina south, and Darby herself in the north. She tosses herbs into the fire until the pungent smoke makes everyone’s eyes water, then produces the cow’s heart. She slices off four small pieces, which they eat (not without some exaggerated expressions of disgust), and then throws the rest of the heart into the center of the bonfire as she begins to chant in a language none of them understand.

The electric aura around Darby flares to life as she reads the incantation. Her hair stands straight up from her scalp and seems to move in a nonexistent wind, and her eyes are lit not by the bonfire but by some light within. Kayden feels the hairs on his body raise as his skin pebbles into gooseflesh. Filament-fine arcs of electricity begin to play off of Darby’s form, then jump to Kayden, Sat, and Raina, linking them in a circle. Another few guttural phrases sends the lightning arcing over to Tanner’s body, linking him into the spell. As Darby’s voice rises to a crescendo Kayden feels a sensation like a fist clenched just under his diaphragm that seems to lift him almost off his feet, his toes just skimming the ground- and then all the energy in the circle seems to rush towards Tanner, and Kayden drops back to his feet feeling tired and winded as though he’s just finished running a marathon.

On the stone outcropping Tanner’s body is so swarmed with crackling lines of energy that Kayden can barely see what is happening, but he has a vague impression of growth, the figure filling out again from emaciated corpse to a complete human body. The gemstones on his body glow even brighter than the surrounding storm of energy and then, one by one, crack and go out like a blown lightbulb. As the last stone cracks, there is a bright flash of energy and then darkness.

Kayden blinks the spots from his eyes for several moments. When his eyes clear, he’s hit with a wave of vertigo at the sight of Tanner’s body, no longer a shriveled and broken corpse, but whole and unmarred, eyes closed and face peaceful. His clothes are still a disaster, but if Kayden didn’t know better he’d say Tanner was sleeping. Seeing him just as he remembered is a shock to his system and he realizes with a jolt, for all their bickering and squabbles, just how much he’s missed Tanner’s steady presence. For the first time in months Kayden feels tears sting the corners of his eyes.

Sat breaks from the circle first, walking towards Tanner with hesitant steps, as though she’s afraid he’ll be snatched away from her at any moment. Reaching his body, she takes one of his hands with her trembling own, and reaches up to brush his lank bangs back from his eyes. Kayden doesn’t realize he’s followed her until he’s at her shoulder, but he can’t bring himself to touch Tanner like Sat is doing. If he feels that death-cold skin he is going to break down, and they don’t have time for that.

After another minute or two Darby breaks the silence.

“Hey guys, c’mon. We have to get the next part done before moonrise.”

Kayden tears his gaze away from Tanner and nearly runs into Raina, gone unnoticed at his right elbow. He catches himself before they collide, but comes close enough to see unshed tears shining in her eyes before she schools her face and offers him a weak grin. Kayden pats her back in response, certain that if he tried to smile it would look panicked and upsetting.

The four of them move together past the fire to the ancient and gnarled tree. Kayden’s pulse picks up, speeding jackhammer fast in his throat. The prospect of what he’s about to do feels imminent and real now that Tanner’s body lies as physical proof of Darby’s power, where before it was a pure hypothetical. Kayden hadn’t really been certain they’d make it even this far, but like hell is he going to pussy out now. It’s not like he doesn’t risk his life on the daily, it’s just that it’s usually drinking too much or driving like an asshole, not anything this... immediate.

Darby catches his shoulder, looking like she’s about to say something, and for a moment he thinks she might offer him one last out, wonders for a split second if he’d say ‘yes, stop, i want to get off the ride’ if she did, but the moment passes and she closes her parted lips, settles for squeezing his shoulder lightly and moving on to where the supplies for this part of the ritual are piled at the base of the tree.

“Are you ready?” Sat asks. Kayden steels himself- what’s a little pain, really, weighed against Tanner’s life?- and nods. Sat pulls his head to hers and kisses him softly, once, twice, then lets him go. Kayden steps up to the tree, squares up like he’s going to fight it, drains the last of the whiskey from his flask, then strips out of his heavy military jacket and the t-shirt underneath as well. The rapidly cooling night air pricks goose flesh across his torso and he can’t repress a shiver.

Darby steps up to face him, silvered blade in hand, and has Kayden sling one arm around Raina’s neck and the other around Sat’s to brace himself. She runs the blade through the flame of a candle several times to be sure it’s clean, and then sets the tip to the skin of his chest and starts to carve symbols like the ones she laid out on the ground earlier. It hurts worse than anything Kayden’s experienced recently, but not as bad as the wounds from fighting the goat man, and nothing near as bad as the feeling of emptiness that had plagued him during that awful year of separation. He grits his teeth and bears it. Darby doesn’t carve deep, enough to draw blood but no more, and the intricate symbols take long enough to detail that he becomes almost used to the sensation.

When she finishes carving, she runs fingers through the blood on Kayden’s torso, and with it paints a long stripe from her lips over her chin and throat, and then a long swipe over Sat’s left cheekbone and a mirrored version on Raina’s right, and lastly a blotted mark across Kayden’s forehead. Darby catches his eyes as she does so, and he gives her a brisk nod. No backing down now.

Darby goes back to the pile of supplies and Kayden disentangles himself from the other two girls and presses his back to the tree’s weathered bark. His pulse throbs in the fresh cuts on his chest and where his throat is constricted with anxiety. Darby returns bearing the hammer and two long carpentry nails. Kayden meets her eyes and jerks in chin up- in challenge, in acceptance- and splays his arms out to either side like wings.

“Hold him,” Darby says, and Raina and Sat brace his arms, pinning them against the tree as Darby lines up the first nail in the center of Kayden’s palm, positioning it carefully between the carpal bones.  _ Tanner _ , Kayden thinks,  _ for Tanner _ , and screws his eyes shut as Darby begins to chant again in that strange language that grates against his ears.

She brings the hammer down.

Kayden screams. The pain is incredible, his focus suddenly narrowed down to that one star-bright point of agony in his hand. Darby strikes with the hammer, again, again, and his hand is pinned in place against the tree. Kayden is dimly aware that he is shaking, struggling against Sat and Raina’s hands, but even as the pain consumes his focus it also seems to push him outside his body and he thinks with surprising clarity that as bad as this feels, he can still handle it.  Darby steps away for a moment, her chanting faltering, and Kayden can feel her resolve wavering.

“Do it!” he hisses raggedly, “Don’t stop now, just do it, Darby, fuckin’ hell!” He pants, sagging against Sat and Raina. Raina, ever the gentle one, presses her hand to his face, surprisingly rock-steady against his shaking.

“Darby,” she says, her soft voice resolute, “We all agreed to this. We can’t stop now.”

Through tear-filled eyes Kayden sees Darby nod once and resume her chant. The second nail is just as bad as the first one, but carries the relief of being the last. Darby’s strange language shifts against his ear, and somehow he seems to understand the end of it.

“ _ You are our messenger, _ ” she says in the strange tongue, taking his face between her hands, “ _ and our sacrifice. _ ” She kisses his forehead and releases him, seeming to diminish as the power that coursed through her with the spell is spent. Joint by joint she folds to the ground, trembling with sudden exhaustion. Raina and Sat slowly release Kayden, and he leans back against the tree as much as he can without pulling at the nails in his palms. His hands throb so badly he can barely feel his individual fingers, everything beyond his wrists a swollen haze of pain. The cuts across his chest are beginning to scab uncomfortably, and he’s getting colder by the second.

“What now?” Sat asks, her voice thick with unshed tears, and Kayden grimaces, wishing she wasn’t so damn empathetic so that he wouldn’t keep hurting her so often. Darby glances up at Kayden with eyes that seem too old for her face, but then quirks her mouth in a familiar expression that means she wishes she had a better answer.

“Now we wait.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So Tanner's death totally wrecked me, and honestly what's the point of having a fantastic occult horror setting if you can't manage even a little resurrection? More to come here, either two or three more chapters depending on how long the next portion shakes out to be.


	2. some kind of dante's inferno bullshit

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kayden hangs on the tree.

Kayden hangs on the tree.

Time passes. He feels colder and colder until he thinks he’ll break and beg for a blanket, fire, anything to alleviate some of this fucking cold, and then gradually it eases, not into warmth but simply comforting numbness. The pain of his hands fades along with the cold, the sharp roaring throb where the nails pierce his flesh dimming down to something like a toothache, unpleasant but ignorable.

His legs give out eventually, numb from the cold and aching with fatigue, buckling under him. He can’t fall far, but his weight is suddenly suspended from his mutilated hands and there’s no holding back his animal cry of pain. He manages to get his feet back under him, but it’s not too long before his legs give out again. He repeats the attempt a few more times before resigning himself to this new state of affairs. Pain from his hands spikes through him again as he sags against the bark and he can’t help making another wounded noise.

Raina and Sat have both gone to sleep in one of the tents, but Darby remains by the banked embers of the bonfire in a pose of deep concentration as she fuels the ongoing spell that will hopefully catapult Kayden across the veil between life in death without actually killing him. She can maintain concentration for one day, and then Raina and Sat will anchor the spell for a day each under Darby’s guidance, and if it hasn’t worked by then it’s never fucking going to and Kayden doesn’t give a shit what happens after that. In contrast to the chill wracking Kayden’s body, Darby’s shucked off her suit jacket and beads of sweat stand out on her pale skin. Her eyes are closed at the moment but the firelight is enough to see the rapid darting of her eyes behind their lids.

Across the fire from Kayden lies Tanner’s renewed form. Kayden’s been trying not to look at it, but unless he closes his eyes the still body seems to draw his gaze like a magnet. This close to the (not corpse, not corpse) body the immensity of Tanner’s absence weighs on Kayden’s heart like an anchor, and he’s trapped against the tree with nothing to distract him or drown it out. He surprises himself by starting to cry.

Like floodgates opening, feelings he’s repressed for months and more come sweeping over him and he’s helpless to do anything but lie back against the tree and experience them fully. Tears build to full body wracking sobs as physical and emotional pain crash down on Kayden in a wave. He misses Tanner, his dry wit and his over protective mother hen attitude helping keep the group’s worst impulses in check, how he could be distracted mid-sentence by the play of light and shadow to go take a picture, his stupid fashion sense and his dorky haircut and the way he’d be really, truly genuine around Kayden sometimes when it was just the two of them because he somehow believed that Kayden really didn’t give a shit. He misses the way the five of them used to be before it all went FUBAR, the seemingly endless parade of days filled with teasing and complaining about school and parents and late nights parked out past the edge of town to stare at the sky and imagine a future where they were amazing and accomplished (and always together, always a team). He misses how Sat used to be back when she wasn’t afraid to be hurt by caring too much, he misses the softness that Darby used to have that’s been burnt up in her search for knowledge, he even misses Raina’s timid shyness that has lately disappeared under an attitude of exhausted apathy.

He doesn’t realize how much sound he’s making until he feels gentle fingertips at his shoulders and blinks through the dimness at Raina, sleep-bedraggled and wrapped tightly in Kayden’s discarded jacket against the cold. She has her old glasses on, and looks at Kayden with an expression he thinks at first is pity. He shies away from her touch, unwilling to let anyone feel sorry for  _ him _ , least of all Raina, until something shifts and he recognizes it as not pity but understanding. Kayden relents and leans into her as she wraps her arms around him, face pressed to the side of his head.

“How did we let it get so wrong, Ray?” he asks, his voice shaking.

“I don’t know, Kayden,” Raina sighs. “We all made mistakes, I guess.” Kayden shivers violently against her and another sob escapes him. Raina feels so warm against his frozen skin she almost burns. “We’ll do better this time, though, I promise.”

\-----

Eventually the sun rises. Kayden barely notices. Pain and cold eventually sent him into a torpor that, if not sleep exactly, at least wasn’t the protracted boredom and agony of being fully conscious. He drifts in and out of awareness as time passes in slow drips and lightning fast flickers. He feels every moment of a drop of condensation running down his face where he can’t wipe it off, but then he blinks and the sun is several inches higher above the horizon, like a bad cut in a movie. The girls wake and begin to move around the camp, re-stoking the fire and making breakfast, appearing to Kayden like a sped up security tape, darting from place to place without catching anything in between as his focus wavers in and out.

Darby keeps her vigil by the fire. She looks almost feverish, and deeply tired, but she holds true to her course, mouth set in familiar stubborn lines. Raina and Sat cook sausages and eggs over the fire, and if Kayden thought things had been painful overnight, it is nothing compared to the ache in his stomach when he smells the cooking food. His mouth had gone dry but now begins to water, and he strains almost without intending to against the nails holding him to the tree. He knew he wouldn’t be able to have food or water during the ritual, but hadn’t realized how truly miserable that would be. The hunger is worse than the knife, worse than the nails, worse than the long freezing night. 

Raina kneels in front of Darby with a plate of food. Darby can’t break her meditation, but if she passes out from hunger they’re also fucked, so Raina breaks sausage up into tiny pieces and carefully hand feeds each one to Darby. Kayden watches Raina’s elegant fingers press against Darby’s chapped lips like a dog lurking under the dinner table. He wants to beg for a scrap of food, something, anything, but just as he’s on the verge of giving in he sees Tanner’s body on the rock across the way and wants to slap himself for his weakness. He settles for tugging against the nails in his hands as hard as he can, letting the sharp spike of pain overwhelm him for a moment.

The air is far from warm, but eventually the direct sunlight falling on him begins to warm Kayden’s numb extremities. It’s pleasant for all of five minutes before pain starts to sing along reawoken nerves from his hands, his chest, his scraped-up back, his arms and shoulders screaming from bearing his weight all night. He groans and tries to get his legs back under him, but the muscles are too locked and cramped. Despite the cool temperature, the sun starts to raise beads of sweat on his face and chest that trickle maddeningly downwards, the creeping tickling sensation worse in its own way than his various pains.

Somehow the day passes, in long molasses-slow stretches and startling lurches when Kayden thinks he must have passed out, although he experiences nothing so restful as sleep. His arms go mostly numb again, as do his legs. His neck has become sore at some point from the extreme angle of his head drooping against his chest, but it hardly registers against the litany of preexisting miseries. He starts to feel dizzy even when he’s alert enough to look around, and is only somewhat aware of Sat and Raina checking on him from time to time. He hears them talking in a rise and fall of high pitched worry and low urgency, but can’t tell one woman’s voice from the other anymore. 

As the sun touches down again on the far horizon Kayden’s vision is beginning to blur and warp. His mouth is so dry, his lips chapped, his skin flushed and burned. He can taste salt- blood, he assumes, run down from where the inner membranes of his nose have dried and broken. The fire is the only certain thing, tangible by its warmth and brightness as everything else breaks apart into uninterpretable fragments of shadow and color, and eventually he loses track of even that much as his vision tunnels into darkness.

\-----

Kayden opens his eyes again to thick grey fog that presses, soothingly cool, against his arms and chest. He feels condensation on his face and absentmindedly wipes it away with one hand, stepping cautiously forward into the strangely opaque fog, only to freeze as he realizes what he’s just done. He slowly turns back to look behind him.

He sees himself, hanging unconscious on the tree, looking like absolute hell, but leached of color and slightly out of focus. Thick red-gold ropes of pulsating light emanate from Kayden’s pierced palms and wind tightly around the iron nails before stringing through space to connect to the palms of whatever spectral form Kayden now inhabits. The same golden light pulses sluggishly below the surface of the cuts on his chest, and Kayden looks down at his own more-immediately-embodied chest to see a similar set of vibrant cuts. Whatever is going on, at the very least Darby’s ritual seems to be accomplishing its purpose of giving Kayden a way back to his body.

His immediate surroundings are all obscured by more fog, but Kayden pushes hesitantly forward towards where the bonfire would be, and within a few steps a muted glow comes into view. A few more reveal the source of the light, but rather than a mundane fire of wood and twigs, he finds instead a brightly blazing miniature sun, suspended in midair and tethered by arcing lines of energy to the greyed-out form of Darby, as dull and colorless as Kayden’s own body except for where electricity emanates from her eyes and nose and mouth to play over her skin and jump between her and the brilliant orb before her. Kayden stares transfixed until something brushes his arm, light as a cobweb, and he jumps. He wheels around to see Raina approaching Darby to sit next to her, and Kayden realizes she must be taking over her leg of the ritual.

Raina begins to chant, though Kayden cannot hear her, only see her lips moving. Light begins to well up from her body, but where Darby is covered in sparking electricity, Raina’s light wells up like water beading on her skin, droplets merging together until it begins to drip down her face and arms, pooling in the hollow of her throat, and then, like a dam breaking, a veritable torrent of liquid-looking energy pours forth from her into the sun where the bonfire was. With a visible gasp, Darby’s connection to the spell breaks and she slumps backwards, her crackling aura dissipating. The vague shadow of Sat appears out of the fog and helps Darby unsteadily to her feet and out of sight, presumably to a well earned rest in the tent. Kayden lingers a moment longer, transfixed by the sight of Raina’s magic. He hasn’t thought of her as  _ magical _ in a long time, but seeing her power visibly overflowing reminds him of when she used to fill sketchbooks with dragons and fairies and gods, and he wishes she could see herself now.

Eventually he tears himself away and steps back out into the thick grey mist, moving away from the campsite. Within moments the light is hidden behind him, but the faintly glowing threads connecting him back to his body unspool without any tugging or friction, an intangible but comforting link back to his friends. As he walks trees periodically loom out of the fog. Most are greyed-out and intangible, but a few are dark and vibrant and he can touch them with his incorporeal hands and feel bark as real as anything he’s ever touched in the waking world. Some of these ooze dark red sap, and one notable one is lit from the inside by fire that seems to consume its heartwood without turning it to ash or emitting any heat.

Kayden spends a while heading in whichever direction seems the most like downhill, lacking any better way of telling where he’s going. He picks his way over steep rock faces and tumbled falls of boulders that appear out of the dim mists without warning. Some he thinks he recognizes from trekking around the mountain in the daylight world, but others are unfamiliar and it’s impossible to get any meaningful bearings on his location. At one point he comes across a cliff face covered in crude paintings. The paint is arterial red, jarring against the general lack of color, and seems to show a fierce battle with many opponents wielding spears and bows, a dark plain beneath them and a disembodied head that might be a stylized goat floating above the whole. Kayden shudders and moves past it quickly.

As he descends the mist begins to clear, like descending out of a cloud bank, and Kayden realizes with an abrupt and upsetting jolt that he hasn’t been descending a mountain at all. Instead he’s been journeying down into a huge pit in the earth, bigger than anything he’s ever seen save the Grand Canyon, like the mold from which the mountain in the waking world had been cast. He can see across the empty air to the other side, similarly covered in brush and rocks, but so distant he can’t pick out anything specific. The downhill slope he’s been following seems to spiral down and down along the edges of the pit into a shadowed and indistinct void in the earth where he can’t see any further.

He hopes he can find Tanner before he has to go down there.

Kayden walks a while longer, but it’s hard to say how much time is really passing without any sun or moon to track in the sky. He walks at a steady pace without ever feeling particularly tired or winded, his feet never growing sore, the air cool but never chilling him. He no longer feels hungry or thirsty, unless he focuses on the softly glowing tether tying him back to his physical body, and then he can feel the ghostly discomfort of his far-away corporeal form like a sensation half-remembered. Even though he’s left the fog bank behind, the sound of his footsteps seems muffled, the sounds dying quickly rather than ringing out the way he expects in such an open space.

He finally pauses again at an unexpected sight. One of the few more vibrant, tangible trees protrudes at a precarious angle from the edge of the ledge on which Kayden walks. Embedded deep in its trunk, seeming almost to have grown naturally from the tree itself, is an antique radio face much like the one they had found in Agatha and Simon’s creepy old house. He drops to his belly and scoots as far he dares over the edge of the ledge, straining one hand out to touch the tuning dial. He still remembers the number of the godawful station full of the sounds of screaming and killing, and with trembling fingers he turns the dial accordingly.

Silence. Faint buzzing static, a sound like wind blowing over a mic. Nothing more.

Kayden sighs and starts to pull himself up again, half disappointed and half relieved, and then freezes mid crouch as he hears a soft, crackling sob come over the radio. He waits for a long moment, neither moving nor breathing, until he hears another faint cry, a gasp for breath, and then a soft low keening. It’s hard to be certain, but the sounds are pitched lower than Kayden would expect from a girl.

“...Tanner?” he breathes, “Tanner, can you hear me?”

Static. Another choked sob, a faint rustling sound, a low sigh. Wind.

Kayden straightens up and brushes chalky dust from his hands and knees. Whatever the source of the sound is, the radio appears to be one way only, and he doesn’t have time to waste listening to the radio hoping for some clue. He has to keep moving forward.

\-----

The landscape gradually changes as Kayden descends further into the earth. The trees become sparser, the earth more rocky and barren, lacking any grasses or shrubs. There are signs of people here, too: stone circles holding the long cold ashes of campfires, the occasional discarded arrowhead, a flint knife broken in two pieces on the ground. There are more recent items, too: a pair of old fashioned spectacles, a threadbare handkerchief, a strange wooden tray with a metal sieve in the bottom that Kayden is mostly sure is something used for prospecting. Kayden never went in for scouting or camping, but he’s also gradually becoming aware of many, many human footprints on the earth, as though crowds of people have traveled this same downwards path over years and years.

The walls of the pit have become sheer cliff face this far down, rather than the more gradual slopes higher up, and there are exposed crystals and veins of some shining ore that Kayden suspects might be gold, but it’s impossible to tell in this colorless place. It’s growing darker and darker, and if not for the faint pool of light shed around him by the magical tether, Kayden’s not certain he’d be able to see anything. 

As he steps closer to the rock face to try to see the vein of ore a little better, his foot slips over something smooth that rolls under him, and he goes crashing to the ground. The muffling effect of this weird dimension doesn’t extend to the physical effects of landing hard on sharp stones, and his palms get cut to shit as he tries to catch himself. Swearing, he pushes himself up to his knees, casting around for whatever he tripped over. He scans rock, dirt, more rock, and then something dark and shining that makes his breath catch in his throat. He reaches out and picks it up, holding it close to the glow from his chest to be certain of what he sees as he turns it over.

A cracked but unmistakable black plastic film canister.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cut this chapter a little shorter than I might have otherwise because I wanted to get something posted for all you lovely people who've commented on the first chapter to say how much you enjoyed it. Progress is slow because I'm sneaking writing in alongside what feels like a bajillion other obligations, but I haven't abandoned this by any means.


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